In a variety of software applications for creating documents, such as applications for creating text documents, drawing documents, chart documents, slideshow documents, or spreadsheet documents, a user can both create document elements (such as organization chart shapes in a drawing document) and assign colors to elements. While users can use this capability to create documents that are more visually interesting than documents that are uniformly black and white, it is typical for users who are not professional graphic designers to select colors that are discordant, or otherwise visually incompatible, when displayed together. Creating documents exhibiting such color incompatibility is generally undesirable to the creators and users of such documents.
In order to assist less experienced users in choosing coordinated colors, some applications provide predefined color schemes. Each color scheme specifies a color (each color being a particular combination of hue, luminance, and saturation values) for each of a number of document element features. For example, in a drawing application, every color scheme may specify a color used for lines making up the borders of drawing shapes, a color used to fill shapes, a color used for text included in shapes, and a color used for shadows cast by shapes. The different colors in a color scheme are selected by the designers of the application to be visually compatible, so as to be pleasing when displayed together.
Each shape created using a color scheme uses the color scheme's colors for all of its features. For example, where an organizational chart having three shapes each representing a different division of a company is created using a scheme, each of the three shapes has the same border color, fill color, and so on. When a user creates a document whose elements' colors are all selected by applying a color scheme, the coordination of the colors of the scheme generally lends the document a certain visual appeal.
In the case of some applications, where document elements are created using one color scheme, their colors can be transformed by applying different color schemes until the user is satisfied with the appearance of the document. For example, where shapes are created using a color scheme whose fill color is blue, a different color scheme may be applied to the shape that specifies purple as its fill color, resulting in the fill color of all of the shapes being changed to purple.
In order to communicate more information, however, a user may wish to color a drawing element differently from other similar drawing elements. For example, in the organizational chart mentioned above—where the scheme's fill color is blue, causing the division shapes to generally be filled with blue—the user may wish to color the shape for an underperforming division red to visually reflect its underperformance. In order to do so, the user must select a color not specified in the color scheme, which may be visually incompatible with the colors of the scheme, and therefore incompatible with the colors of the other drawing elements.
Also, if the user chooses to apply a different scheme to the scheme-colored elements, it is generally not possible to apply the new scheme to the user-colored element without discarding the user-selected color and homogenizing the coloring of this element with that of the others.